


The Next Generation and The Dog

by Linnet



Series: A little bit of the past can change an awful lot of the future [3]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Crack, Fluff, Gen, Humour, I Don't Even Know, My Brain Is Ridiculous, This won't make any sense without reading the rest of the series first, seriously, sorry - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-25
Updated: 2013-08-25
Packaged: 2017-12-24 16:21:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/942027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linnet/pseuds/Linnet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This should probably be the next chapter of the fic, not the next part in the series. It won't make any sense if you don't read the rest first!</p><p>Emma is John's daughter. Hamish is James and Q's son. So far, they've always been surrounded by adults. Without the protection of their family, what are two eight-year olds to do? Wash the dog, obviously. In a swimming pool. </p><p>Or; what happens when I try and write friendly bonding between non-canoical children.</p><p>Thank you again to my incredible beta <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/users/Iriya/profile">Iriya</a>, who, as ever, has made this so much better than I could ever have anticipated. Thank you for consistently exceeding my already-high expectations!</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Next Generation and The Dog

**Author's Note:**

  * For [legekg](https://archiveofourown.org/users/legekg/gifts).



> I blame this entirely on legekg, who commented on the last part of this series about a week ago and reminded me that a) it existed, b) when I started writing it I had more plans for what I was doing with it, and c) Hamish and Emma hadn't officially had any proper interaction yet. 
> 
> I have no idea what happened, but I couldn't stop thinking about the two of them, and suddenly I had a ficlet.  
> Thank you! (I think)

Emma knocks on the bedroom door, quietly.

"Daddy?"

She doesn't exactly mean it to come out as a whisper, but it does anyway. It is very quiet upstairs, and when there were lots of people all talking in the kitchen, it seemed to be very much louder. The difference makes the silent hall seem a much bigger quiet than it was before, she thinks.

There is no answer from within. She wonders if her daddy's asleep. He can fall asleep very quickly if he wants to. It is very annoying when she wants to play catch or something. Especially when Sherlock is out. Then she has to play on her own, which is boring. She likes it better when Sherlock is at home, because he sometimes plays with her if she asks really nicely, or if she sulks at him for too long. His games are much more interesting, too! Sometimes when he is really, really bored, he can think up some really funny ones - though Emma doesn't like to let that happen too often, because then he and Daddy argue and that is nasty.

Having reached the end of her thought train, Emma hovers in the hallway and debates calling out again. If Daddy is asleep, she doesn't want to disturb him. But then again, she did shout for him very, very quietly. Maybe even if he was awake, he wouldn't have heard her. But if she yells too loudly, she might wake him! He can be a very light sleeper, after all.

She dithers uncertainly outside the door for several seconds, though it seems like longer. Eventually, she is struck by an idea. Placing the very full cup of tea down on the floor means he has to poke her concentrating tongue out. None of it gets spilt, though! She counts that as a victory. 

She dashes down the hallway to Sherlock's room. Bursting through the door, she scrambles madly amongst the array of pink clothing abandoned on every surface. Eventually, she digs out her notebook from under a clean but discarded T-shirt with a butterfly on it. It has eyes. The butterfly, that is. She dislikes the top, because even though they are quite pretty, butterflies are still bugs. Besides, this one is incredibly inaccurate - the wings are the wrong shape for flying, for a start, and you just don't get sparkly butterflies, and certainly not in that shade of pink. Plus its eyes are in the middle of its body, which is not only impossible, but very creepy. It looks like it is pulling faces at her. Once she is clutching the notebook tightly in her palm, she turns the T-shirt over so that the butterfly is face down on the floor. Then she stamps on it, hard - just for good measure.

Satisfied, she turns to Sherlock's bedside cabinets and begins to rifle through it. They have only been staying here a few days, but there is already a strange collection of samples in test-tubes that rattle as she pulls the drawer open. Underneath them, however, she finds Sherlock's own notebook. It is considerably less pink than Emma's own. It is black, in fact, and bound with leather. It has a silk ribbon bookmark seen into the spine. It is very swish, and it feels lovely, but Emma knows better than to take it out of the pages to stroke. Well, she knows now. (It is a shame that the ribbon is a bit tatty at the end, but that really wasn't her fault. How was she supposed to know? It wasn't like anyone had told her!)

Beside the book, however, is her prize. She has to shuffle a few of the test-tubes to get to it. The one that has got yellowish and orange layers of juice hisses at her when she shuffles it over, so she grabs the pen and pulls her hand away from it quickly. Maybe she moves a little too quickly, but if one of the tubes gets dislodges and falls, then it is only an accident. And if it hits the carpet with a little thunk, then it really isn't on purpose. And there is only a teeny tiny crack, and only a very very little bit of purple fluid seeps out onto the carpet, and Emma puts it back very, very quickly before any real damage is done. All the tubes have stoppers in though, so that is okay. None of them will be able to get mixed up.

Perching herself on the edge of Sherlock's bed, she writes carefully. She has been practicing a lot, and her letters aren't anywhere near as big as they used to be! They are a little untidy though, and sometimes the pen doesn't go in exactly the right direction, but that is because Sherlock's pen has a really strange nib, and it is difficult to write ~~with~~ without pulling holes in the paper. Eventually though, she gets it done, and signs it with some hearts, kisses and flowers. Then she draws a little sun in the corner, because 'sunny' and 'jolly' can mean the same thing (though she is not sure what dis-po-si-ti-on means, it is in Daddy's blog so it must be a good word). Then a little rainbow, because rainbows are pretty and she wants the note to be pretty. She wants to draw a unicorn too, but Sherlock says that unicorns are highly unlikely to be real. So she draws a smiley face instead.

She leans back and studies the note critically, like the detectives do on TV. It does look pretty now. The smiley face is a bit wonky, but it is not quite frowning, so that is okay. And of course, it is not a proper rainbow without colours, but her colouring pens are downstairs. Daddy will know anyway. He is clever like that. And he can use his imagination to see how pretty she means it to be.

She puts the pen back, and watches it disappear among the purple bubbles gathering in the drawer. Sherlock shouldn't be _too_ put out - it matches the carpet, and they are quite pretty bubbles really. Even so, he might be annoyed. So she fetches the butterfly T-shirt and shoves it in the drawer so that the bubbles don't leak any more. That done, she dashes back along the hallway, note in hand.

When she reaches Daddy's room, she carefully tears the note away from the pad, trying not to rip the sun in the corner. Then she tucks it under the door. Satisfied, she puts the notebook next to the cup of tea and skips down to the stairwell. She skips downstairs, too, taking the steps two at a time.

Behind her, the door opens a crack, and then swings wider. John peeks his head out, but Emma's already gone. He smiles down at the tea left outside his door, and the notebook dumped beside it that is unmistakably his daughter's. Picking up the cup and saucer in one hand any the notebook in the other, he closes the door again, and retreats inside. The first sip reveals that the tea is lukewarm, but it doesn't really matter.

Emma almost reaches the last landing before she remembers that Sherlock had used what Daddy calls 'that tone of voice' when he asked her to go upstairs. She doesn't quite manage to stop in time, but when she reaches the little landing she starts to turn round immediately, until she sees Hamish. He and Beowulf are curled up under the hall table together, and it is unclear which bit of shaggy jet-black hair belongs to whom.

"Hamish!" Emma hisses, and the boy raises his head, his ice blue eyes searching her out. Emma is hanging through the banisters on the stairs, beckoning wildly. "Come on, we're not supposed to be downstairs!" Hamish sits up properly, his brow furrowed in confusion.

"Why not?" he whispers back, as loudly as he dares.

"Sherlock said! Come on, come upstairs!" Still, Hamish looks reluctant. Emma sighs.

"I can show you around, come on! Downstairs is boring anyway. There's an observatory upstairs, and a library, and lots of really really old rooms that we're not supposed to go in, but the locks are all rotten."

Hamish hauls himself to his feet at the mention of a library, but as soon as he reaches the bottom of the stairs, Beowulf begins to whine. Hamish looks guiltily back over his shoulder. The Newfoundland is doing an impressive job of looking miserable - his massive black head is resting on his paws, his bulk slumped under the table like a huge black rug. Ears drooping, muzzle resolutely closed, and covered from head-to-toe in mud, he is a sorry sight.

"Do you think I can bring Beowulf?" he asks Emma. She pulls a face.

"He's very muddy. I don't think Uncle Mycroft would be very pleased."

"The suit man? Does he get angry?"

"Well… not really. He goes all quiet and dangerous and says, 'I'm really disappointed in you, Emma' in his mean voice and it makes you feel all weak and guilty even if you only did something little that hardly mattered anyway, like accidentally smashing one of his china cups." Hamish looks horrified.

"Did you do that?" he asks, wide-eyed.

"Only a little bit! It was nearly empty anyway, I hardly spilt any tea!" She looks so defiant, standing with her hands on her hips, her nose screwed up, that Hamish doesn't dare argue.

"Well, anyway, I'm not leaving Beowulf on his own down here. He'll get lonely!" Emma concedes the point, and looks down at Beowulf, who droops even more and looks sadder than ever. She melts a little bit under his chocolate-brown gaze. He is very, very cute.

"We could give him a bath, I suppose. Then he wouldn't get mud everywhere," she suggests. Hamish shakes his head, sadly.

"He doesn't fit in our bath at home. There's so much of him, there's no room left for the water. It gets all over the floor, and Dad gets frustrated with him," he explains. 

"Oh." Emma looks deflated for all of a second before her face lights up again. "Oh!" She doesn't elaborate. Hamish feels a bit lost.

"'Oh' what?" he asks. 

"The swimming pool! That'll be plenty big enough to wash him in!"

 

-O-

Sherlock makes his way through the drawing room to the stairs, and pads quietly upstairs. If he notices the large muddily paw-prints on the wooden boards, he doesn't mention them. If he hears the splashes and quickly-hushed shrieks from behind the door of the second floor, he doesn't acknowledge them. He keeps walking, and leaves Emma and Hamish to make friends, instead of interfering. John keeps telling him off for suspecting every passing stranger of being a criminal, but Sherlock doesn't see the problem with keeping Emma safe. Hamish is a different matter, however. He is the son of Sherlock's own brother and an MI6 agent, and he has already proved that he is incredibly intelligent. So he leaves them to it, and continues climbing the stairs. Honestly, he should probably have thought about it a little more, but he was preoccupied. _Sentiment_.

“John?” he calls quietly when he reaches the third floor, unable to hear the running of water. He finds John sitting on the bed with his back to the door, rubbing a towel through his hair. Sherlock takes one step into the room and closes the door behind him, and then suddenly realises that he is trapped with John, who is crying silently still, tears running down his cheeks. Unable to think of anything to say, he just moves over to his friend and puts his hand on his shoulder. It scares him when John is like this, because he doesn’t understand. He knows how to deal with an angry John, and has done many times, but he is well aware of the fact that his inability to understand sentimental reactions has threatened their friendship on more than one occasion, and has been the cause for more arguments than he likes to count.

John wipes the tears away, and smiles up at him.

“You’re an idiot,” he says, and Sherlock is, once again, surprised by his friend.

“No I’m not. How am I?” he asks, and John smirks.

“Never mind. I’ll be downstairs in a minute, alright?” Sherlock frowns at him.

“No. You quite obviously don’t want James and Quentin to see you like this, and they’re not going to mind if you clean yourself up a bit. Stay up here for a while, they can wait.”

“That’s not very sociable is it?” Sherlock huffs, frustrated.

“Not important right now. What we should be more worried about is that Emma and Hamish are attempting to give Beowulf a bath.” John looks up at him, surprised.

“What?”

“I can hear them downstairs. The footprints on the stairs were a big giveaway too.” John blinks. A loud bark and an unmistakeable splashing on the floor below them confirms Sherlock's deduction. John swears under his breath and leaps to his feet, following Sherlock from the room.

They clatter down the stairs to the second floor, which is taken up almost entirely by an Olympic-sized swimming pool and accompanying wet rooms. John hasn’t spent much time in this part of the house, as he always feels a little overwhelmed by the scale of the Holmes’ legacy, but he recognises enough to know that there really shouldn’t be a massive Newfoundland paddling around in the middle of the pool, and there definitely shouldn’t be two small children hanging onto him, still fully dressed, being dragged around the pool.

They are going in circles, the dog leaving a quickly dissipating trail of mud after him as his paws begin to wash clean. Emma and Hamish are squealing with excitement, and Beowulf is barking too, and all three are quite obviously having the time of their lives. Only seconds later, James and Mycroft appear, drawn to the scene by the shouting. Upon seeing James, the dog gives a loud bark and paddles to the side in seconds, pulling himself out of the water and launching himself at the agent, who goes down like a sack of potatoes. Beowulf just sits on him, soaking wet and dripping tail wagging, looking pleased with himself. James groans, and Mycroft looks at him with interest.

“Does he always do that?” he asks. Hamish has pulled himself out of the pool too, and he and Emma stand dripping on the side. He giggles.

“He resents Papa trying to train him. Silly Beowulf, boy.”

“Um, why _is_ he called Beowulf?” asks John.

“Hamish named him,” says James, his voice sounding slightly squashed, struggling out from under the dog’s massive paws.

“He’s a legendary hero!” says Hamish proudly, ruffling the dog’s ears. Beowulf pants, his pink tongue lolling, and then stands up. Mycroft and Sherlock leap behind the door, but the rest of them are soaked when the massive dog shakes his long, wet fur dry, sending droplets of water flying in every direction.

“He’s… he's as daft as a brush, that’s what he is!” exclaims James, angrily wiping muddy water from his eyes. The effect is rather ruined by the fact that he looks like he should be the kind of man to be swearing blind - but he has just expressed one of the most ridiculous curses john's ever heard. From that moment, he decides that James, while odd, is not a bad man.

He looks at the four of them and has to suppress a grin. Emma and Hamish are both soaking wet, as is he, and James is also still covered in mud from Beowulf’s previous incident. In fact, James looks like he has given up entirely on staying clean. Even as John watches, he grabs the bottom of his shirt and peels the sopping garment off over his head.

“He’s pedigree!” pipes up Emma, and James growls. Sherlock is still blinking at James' exposed chest, trying to deduce the causes of every single scar on James' muscled torso. There is a lot to catalogue. A bullet wound in the shoulder, several jagged scars from where broken ribs have perforated the skin along his chest, a clean-cut but obviously deep scar across his right pectoral, and… oh. A love bite just below his collarbone. Sherlock averts his eyes. James doesn't notice him looking, but Mycroft does, and catches Sherlock's expression. It takes a lot of his self-restraint not to grin.

“They don’t breed them for brains, do they?” James says, disgruntled, shaking his short cropped hair. John laughs suddenly, loud and long. Several bemused glances are shared among the others, and they all turn to look at him.

“That dog is a menace. As is my daughter,” he declares. “Would you like a proper shower now James?” he offers, pleasantly. James nods, gratefully, and so John drags all three of them upstairs to sort them out. He hefts Emma onto his hip, ignoring the now spreading wet patch around his chest, and James lets Hamish clamber on for a piggyback.

Sherlock and Mycroft are left with a happily panting dog lying in what looks like more water than the swimming pool contains. They glance warily at each other, and then Beowulf, who just appears to be grinning at them, his tongue still poking out underneath his damp, hairy muzzle.

 

-0-

As John walks Emma up the stairs, he makes her explain exactly what they were doing with Beowulf in the swimming pool in the first place.

"We tried washing him on his own, Daddy, but he would't get in! We rolled the cover all the way back, and…"

"No, we didn't!" Hamish interrupts, indignantly pulling himself further up James' back, pulling on his father's hair to use as a hand-hold. James winces, and grumbles a complaint. Hamish lets go, and scrambles up onto his shoulders instead, using the insides of his elbows as footholds. James has to bend slightly as he is climbing the stairs to avoid bashing Hamish's head on the beams. "She's lying!" he declares, pointing a damning finger at the girl. Emma glares at him.

" _Excuse me_ , I'm trying to tell a _story_ here!" she retorts with attitude, not bothering at all to deny his accusation. " _Anyway_ ," she gripes, "Beowulf wouldn't get in the pool, and Hamish was trying to persuade him to get in when he fell in himself."

"I did not!" the boy denies, hotly.

"You actually did, though!" Emma sticks her tongue out at him.

"Not the falling in part, obviously I know I fell in," he rolls his eyes, exaggeratedly, "I _meant_ it wasn't Beowulf's fault! We were bouncing on the blue thing over the water and I slipped!"

Emma practically growls at him.

" _No, we weren't._ "

John gives her a stern look.

"Is this true, Emma?"

She pulls a sulky face and looks at her feet.

"What have we told you about pulling the cover all the way up before you go anywhere near the water? It's not safe! You could easily have slipped and fallen. What if you'd bashed your head on the side?"

"It wasn't that dangerous, Dad, we were right in the middle of it, and…“ she tries defending herself, but John's having none of it.

"That doesn't make any difference, Emma," he chides.

"It was only a little bounce…"

" _Emma_."

"I know, I know, okay? It was dangerous."

"Yeah, I still fell in," Hamish says, petulantly.

The two children death-glare at each other over their respective parent's shoulders. James tries to hide a grin behind his hand before Emma sees him. He is sure their children are going to get along _famously_. 


End file.
